Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Chan-Seung Lee]

[CP]

The past perfect (also called pluperfect) is used to indicate something that occurred prior to some past event. In this case, something taught the bird a lesson before the time (in the past) that she told the bat about it.

However, the writer was not careful enough to employ the past perfect everywhere that it belongs in this passage. Let me rewrite it:

A bird in a cage at a window used to sing at night-time. A bat which heard her came up and asked why she never sang by day, but only at night. She explained that there was a good reason: While she had been singing once in the daytime, she had been captured, and this had taught her a lesson. "It's no good taking precautions now," said the bat. "You should have been careful before you were caught."

This puts everything that had occurred earlier in time than when the bird and bat were speaking into the past perfect tense, which is grammatically correct.

Hope this helps.
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